wizards of the coast

The best thing about collecting Magic : The Gathering cards is that every few months, they’re going to hit you with a whole new set to tear open, organize, accumulate and trade – and truly, these are some the actions that live warmly at the core of every collector. This month, they hit us with a mystical sledgehammer.

See, there’s always been an undercurrent of narrative that runs beneath all of the existing Magic cards; things that seem related, recurring names, similar creatures and abilities, and images that appear across different cards. Most times, these circumstances and coincidences aren’t really addressed, and attributed to the general goings-on around the section of the world that each subsequent Magic set takes place in. With the newest set of cards, ‘Shards of Alara‘, Wizards of the Coast has published a kind of traveler’s guidebook to Alara that unifies and explains most of the 249 cards in the set. It’s not so much a Fodor’s Guide, inasmuch as it won’t really tell you where to get a good burger or how to avoid being slain by a rampaging swarm of banewasps, but it’s more of a Froud-’Faeries’ style journey through the five ’shards’, or mini-worlds, of Alara, each one centered around one of the five colors of magic, or ‘mana’ – a mainstay element throughout every expansion of Magic that’s now becoming a little more personified by these new narratives. The book explores fiery mountains, death-ravaged swamps, and so forth, as well as the heroes, villains and creatures that dwell within these. And I LOVE monster manuals, from Spiderwick to Dungeons and Dragons.

The Planeswalker’s Guide is an interesting read, adding more solidity to the cards that we all play with, but even more importantly than that, it’s beautiful. Magic employs the best of the best when it comes to dynamic, inventive fantasy artists, which is important in a visual genre that quickly becomes cliché and stale with each inch of needlessly-exposed cleavage. Despite being a jaded artist, I never, ever get bored of Magic’s artwork, which is always on the forefront of design and evolving illustration theory, while always remaining classic and attentive to core visual ideas. I don’t know if I can gush enough.

The book reprints much of the card art from Alara, which Wizards has also published online, though it appears in a slightly larger format in the book, which also displays the concept sketches and artwork that the artists used in forming and communicating their final ideas.

In addition to the basic set of 249 cards, there are also five different, pre-structured starter decks to play with, all of which include basic rules and explanations, so it’s an excellent place to leap in and start playing if you’ve never played before. I’m going to continue to search the shiny, foil packs for some of the super-rare, powerful ‘Planeswalker’ cards to introduce them to my game, but I haven’t been this reinvigorated about Magic in… well, about a month. Because it’s that much fun.

Go and buy a pack and get sucked in.

[Click here for parts ONE, TWO, THREE and FOUR]

Among the thousands of cards in the Magic lexicon, a healthy handful stand out as exceptionally rare, valuable or powerful – and most are a combination of the three. Prices for these exceptional cards can exceed $10,000, so if you were playing Magic about 15 years ago, you’ll want to dig through your closet and see what you might have.

Basic trading card quality rules apply here, so all Magic cards are worth exponentially more if they’ve never actually been abused by being utilized in a game or stuck in a bicycle spoke or used as a beer coaster, so fortune favors the lonely and/or sober.

Additionally, almost all of the cards come from the very first releases of Magic, which emerged in three phases. ‘Alpha’, the very first release of Magic cards, happened at Origins in 1995. This inaugural set consisted of about 295 different core cards, all with black borders, and about 2.6 million were printed. When these sold out, a second printing called ‘Beta’ was printed up, with an additional 7.3 million cards. This collection was the same core set, but issued with corrections and a slightly more square shape (which has been used for every subsequent set). Finally, when these sold out, the far more common ‘Unlimited’ edition came out, consisting of the same cards, but with white borders, a few more corrections. A fourth printing, unofficially called ‘Summer Magic’ or ‘Edgar’, was to have revised further issues, but because of printing problems and more card errors, most of these booster boxes were scrapped. A few did emerge from the warehouses and made their way to England, though, and remain highly sought after.

Because of the quantities of these cards that were printed, Alpha is usually worth more than Beta, which is worth more than Unlimited. The following list of uber-cards is almost entirely pulled from the fabled ‘Power 9′ collection – cards that are exceptionally more powerful than the rest of the cards in the game. It’s also worth nothing that sealed booster packs from any of the early releases can sell from $10,000 to $1000, easily.

1. The most valuable Magic card in public release is the Black Lotus, which currently averages around $1500 for a near mint Beta edition. The Alpha edition has notably sold for over $10,000 in one or two rare cases, and like most collectibles, professionally graded editions of the card just get wacky. While the card is basically a nigh-invulnerable explosion of pure death magic, it also works in any possible deck that the player might choose to make, as it isn’t mana-color specific. Early adapters of the game weren’t just rewarded with super-powered cards – if they held onto these things for about ten years, they could afford about 5 years worth of rent. Or bail money, which is the opposite of rent. As long as you don’t have the reprinted ‘Collectors Edition’ of the card, you have money in the bank. It’s times like this that I wish I could go back to my 14-year old self and tell him to buy the heck outta this game so that future-me could go to a good college.

2. Speaking of time travel, Time Walk comes in as the second most valuable wide-release card in the game. It’s a card that cheaply, but assertively, informs your opponent, “screw you, I’m taking another turn.” While a player generally gets to start fresh at the beginning of their own turn, your opponent’s resources remain tapped out. Your monsters are now fresh as belligerent daisies and can make another violent attack, easily penetrating any flagging defenses, easily dealing a game-ending blow when played at the right time. The Unlimited edition of Time Walk has recently sold at auction for prices around $500, while a Beta finished up at over $700, and the original Alpha is nowhere to be seen. Like the Lotus, this is another one of the ‘Power 9′ cards.

3. Also part of the Power 9, the third most powerful and rare cards are the five Moxes : Mox Pearl, Mox Ruby, Mox Jet, Mox Emerald and Mox Sapphire. All of these are Artifacts, or magical items, like the Lotus, and all of them entitle you to an anytime, anywhere source of magic, like an iPod with Andrew Bird on it, or a never-ending carton of Whoppers. Since magic, or ‘mana’ is pretty much the lifeblood of everything that you summon onto the gaming table, any card that gives you fast mana is usually pretty popular. The Unlimited editions of these cards round out at about $300, while the Alpha and Beta versions have recently topped $700.

4. Ancestral Recall – the card that allows you to painlessly add three turns worth of weaponry to your hand in short order, was recently valued at about $700 on eBay for a Beta edition. Of course, you can also force your opponent to draw three cards, which sounds exceptionally generous – unless they’re out of cards and playing in ‘Vintage’ format, wherein one suffers an automatic loss if you cannot draw a card when you are required to do so. Such is the nature of the blue cards. Like my second girlfriend, they’re master manipulators – they get inside your stuff and mess it up hardcore, but at least they don’t call you when they’re drunk at 4 AM and admit to various infidelities with overweight dorm-mates. Again, this is a Power 9 card.

5. Timetwister is the last of the ‘Power 9′ block of cards, allowing all players to reshuffle and reuse all of their exhausted cards. While the Beta card is worth about $300, it’s still nothing to scoff at. Again, Timetwister is a blue card – arguably the most powerful and dangerous color in the game.

6. Not willing to settle for only nine ‘Power’ cards, three more cards are sometimes referred to as part of the ‘Power 10′ – not unlike the various Fifth Beatles. Sure, they’re great, but they don’t really fit perfectly into the established set. Two cards from the first major expansion, ‘Arabian Nights’, have this honor : Library of Alexandria and Bazaar of Baghdad. Neither of these were actually even rare in their printed quantities, but their power in the game makes them highly desirable. The third major card in the ‘Power 10′ set is Mishra’s Workshop, from the ‘Antiquities’ set. All of these currently sell for around $130 to $300.

7. The Wizards website states that the rare ‘blue Hurricane‘ card is one of the most sought after cards in the game. Since Hurricane is a green spell, the misprinted blue version is especially rare. It was only included in the aforementioned ‘Edgar’ set, which was accidentally shipped to England. Hurricane itself is a very common card from the very first set of Magic, but the blue version is something like the philatelist’s ‘Inverted Jenny‘ or the numismatist’s 1933 Gold Double Eagle. Is there a word for a Magic card collector?

I usually just use ‘nerd’. Lovingly, of course, as I’m one too.

8. There have also been a small group of cards which have never been available for sale to the public, produced completely outside of the regular sets. Only two different and completely unique official cards were produced. Both were painted by Christopher Rush and designed by Mark Rosewater. The first unique card, called Shichifukujin Dragon, was created exclusively for the DCI Tournament Center in Tokyo, Japan – which was, at the time, the largest single place for organized playing cards. The card’s name actually refers to Japan’s seven deities of good fortune, and the creature itself has the ability to become more powerful with each turn, slowly and infinitely. Most players would deny these as being ‘actual’ Magic cards, given their special circumstances and inutility in game play. Those people would be spoilsports. When it comes to ultra-rare cards, players sometimes make ‘proxy’ cards for fun – regular magic cards with a new face pasted to them to act as a substitute for an otherwise inaccessible card.

9. As I’ve mentioned before, game creator Richard Garfield created three cards for three personal occasions. The first one, Proposal, was slipped into a game between Garfield and his girlfriend, and had the ability to propose marriage. Fortunately, the one time that it ever entered a game, it worked. Because of the personal nature of the card, the image has never been published, and only three people in the world were given a copy – Garfield, the printer at Carta Mundi, and Quinton Hoover. Unfortunately, Hoover’s card was stolen at a convention and has never been recovered.

The other two were printed in quantities of about 100 or so and given to personal friends of the Garfield family – birth announcements for their two children, ‘Splendid Genesis‘ and ‘Fraternal Exaltation‘.

10. Remember those two unique cards? The second is called 1996 World Champion, and was given to Australia’s Tom Chanpheng. You can probably guess why. After this card was printed, all proof copies, and the printing plates, were destroyed. Last we heard, this card was stored safely at Tom’s place in Australia, and in a screwdown case.

After sending Tom a quick inquiry, he had this to say :

“I sold the card in 2001. In late 2000, I started up an internet cafe and things were going well so I was thinking about expanding, right on cue I got a phone call from someone representing an anonymous collector who was interested in buying the card. I didn’t want to part with the card but he made a good offer and I needed the money to expand the business so I sold it. The price I sold it for was $17,500US. I thought it was a good offer at the time. I have no clue how much it would be worth now.”

So, this price tag officially marks it as the most valuable Magic card. Once Tom started up the cafe, he fell out from the official tournament scene, but still has his old cards and plays from time to time.

And that’s the 15th anniversary of a little card game called Magic – a thing that’s inspired many, and somehow altered the course of countless lives. If that’s not enough reason to take it seriously, I don’t know what is.

[Special thanks to the folks at StrikeZoneOnline.com and Pojo.com for their help in assembling this list!]

[For Part One, please click here!]

Wizards of the Coast, owners of the whole Magic : The Gathering card game (as well as the patent for the very concept of collectible trading card games), holds events throughout the world for Magic players to congregate, play, and win prizes that range from free packs of cards to cars and $50,000+ jackpots. These events have been broadcast on ESPN and they’re pretty serious about the whole Tournament thing, but neither of these things makes attending an MtG event any less fun – even if you’ve never played before.

I was traveling with fellow writer Brian, who is an avid Dungeons and Dragons player and former Heroclix player, but who has never played Magic. As I mentioned previously, I hadn’t played since my mouthbreathing high school ‘friends’ started meticulously sanding the clothes off of their female action figures and I decided that my real-life girlfriend was superior in most aspects. This particular demographical observation isn’t a reflection upon Magic players, but it IS a reflection upon living in an isolated area in upstate New York. Brian and I arrived at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago (on the shores of the beautiful Lake Michigan) and set to work to learn the game properly.

We didn’t have to go further than the entrance to the event before we found a ‘LEARN TO PLAY’ area, all set up and ready to help us learn the ropes. Behind the desk was Christian, a volunteer from Canada and unofficial ‘Magic Cheerleader’, whose ebullience made the Learn To Play Booth a hub of activity and an interesting place to retreat to between games and interviews during the course of the entire weekend. With the excellent and studied teachings of Christian and Jeff, Brian quickly picked up on the game and before I knew it, we were entered into a mini-tournament on the main floor. I suddenly became very nervous. I hadn’t summoned a Benevolent Unicorn in over a decade, my old collection of Slivers and Angels was way back in New York, and my Serpent Generator was rusty. I could barely turn the crank.

Brian and I were placed into a group of eight players, and we were all handed three booster packs of cards. Brian began to tear open his first pack, much to the horror of the accompanying players, and we quickly learned that there were rules and decorum for this kind of thing. When the DCI Judge asked if anyone at the table hadn’t played Magic before, Brian raised his hand and was dismissed as the resident smartass – which he was, just not in this specific case. We got things sorted out and we began to play.

Despite having no cards at the beginning of the day, these 15-card boosters were here for us to make gaming decks out of – and to keep! Each player would take their favorite or most useful card from the pack, and pass the rest of the pack on to the next player, in a process that would be repeated until there were no cards left. Out of these completely random cards, the players were forced to test their skill at building a viable 40-card deck out of a limited palette (as well as bonus of potentially discovering a valuable card). Mostly, I just grabbed cards that looked neat – with a focus on cards that used white magic, using the strange Godhead of Awe as the focus of my deck.

When we were done assembling decks of cards, we were paired off by the DCI Judges. The DCI, or Duelists Convocation International, is an omnipresent force at these Magic tournaments. They provide decisions when cards might not make perfect sense to both players, they organize rounds, and they prevent cheating. Yes, despite all of the fun, there can be cheating, as with any event where a prize is at stake, but I was informed that sneaky players were very rare and not something that had to be dealt with often. Should any two players remain unsure about how two or more cards interact, a hand would fly up to the call of ‘JUDGE!’, and a DCI judge, in full referee regalia, would be fast to respond and resolve any issues presenting themselves. It was an efficient, powerful system to see in action.

I ended up playing against an amazingly patient guy named Patrick, who calmly explained everything I was unsure about. Honestly, any player who was paired against us was pretty much guaranteed a spot in round two, so I’m sure that they were pretty psyched about contending with bumbling idiots – even while they remained completely honest and even suggested better moves when one of our choices was not well-made. The game was played in ‘best two out of three’ terms, and when my resurfacing Magic skills actually won a match and Patrick & I went into a third round, it felt pretty good – even when I finally lost. It was just fun to play again, and mostly know what I was doing. It was like riding a bike. The very strong core rules, designed by mathematics PhD Richard Garfield, inform everything else within the game, and they’re easy to remember.

When it was all said and done and we were both removed from competition, another player walked up to Brian and handed him a stack of at least 300 extra cards that said player didn’t want to lug home with him. It was a moment of camaraderie and generosity that would encapsulate the entire weekend and everyone we’d meet there. Can I stress enough that these are events that you want to go to, even if you have only the most remote interest in games? It might not be the best place for a guy to go looking for a date, but if you’re a chick, you pretty much have the pick of the litter. Also happening nearby in Chicago were a gathering of Masons, Lollapalooza, and the Black Womens’ Expo – and more than a few attendees of these events wandered curiously into the gaming hall.

My gaming loss marked the temporary end of my professional Magic career, but that didn’t stop Brian and I from procuring packs at the Magic Pro Shop booth and playing until 2 AM up in the hotel room. Down on the main floor, a ‘Gunslinging’ area was set up during the day for players to match decks against champions, designers, and even Richard Garfield himself – so even if you weren’t close to being in a tournament, you could claim the glory of playing against one of the game’s luminaries, win or lose.

The idea that the genesis of this was all in a small collectible card game was staggering.

By Sunday afternoon, the top eight players had been sorted out. WotC was liveblogging every deciding game onto their website, where they catalogued every match-up and crucial move to the captive audiences at home. Crowds gathered, people were forced out of competition, and professional gamer Michael Jacob from Livonia, MI came out on top, having beat out 8th place contender and close hometown friend (and guy with awesome hair), Mark Herberholz, early on.

Herberholz, a former $40,000 Magic winner, and recent graduate from Michigan State University, who was suitably crestfallen. “So close, but so far!” said Herberholz, “I think I’ve reached a certain level where I’m considered to be one of the best in the game that’s still playing, so right now the goal was to make the National team and finish in the top three, but since I didn’t do that and I came really close, it’s almost more disappointment than if I had just lost early on.”

Despite Mark’s disappointment, his position in the World Championships is already assured, so things remain both onward and upward. He seemed content to have at least been bested by a friend, and he told us that his interest in Magic has not waned. He has plans on hunting down a job at Upper Deck so that he can continue to compete in Wizards tournaments as a non-employee. Like many players, he was introduced to the game by bored friends who had found an excellent outlet for themselves. In his case, it was a $40,000 outlet.

Mike Jacob was thrilled to have won the final match against Sam Black, netting a prize of $5000, a big trophy, and a place in the World Finals. In our post-game interview, he credited a card called ‘Skred‘ in his ultimate victory over Black. He quickly launched into MtG language in the interview, and for as much as I understood at this point, I felt officially initiated into the club.

“It was a choice that nobody else in the tournament had done. I usually do play a lot of unique cards. Like, there’s a 3 mana 4/4 that can’t block that most people dismissed, and there was a 3/3 haste available, and I played this one instead because I thought it was better against the field”, said Mike. “It feels pretty good. I made a lot of really tight plays, and that’s how I got here.”

When we asked what his favorite part about the game was, he quickly replied, “Definitely the people. I just have so many friends that I met through this game, and I get to see them once a month, maybe twice a month at the other tournaments I go to. If I was gonna go to San Francisco, I could call three people and have a place to stay. How many people can say that they have friends all over the United States?”

This was an answer that we heard many times from many players. Even above the idea of free lodging across the US, the friendships that were made through the game were the most enduring, solid aspect of the gaming community. When asked if he’s let his friend Herberholz hold the trophy, he jokingly said “No, definitely not! He’s had enough accomplishments!”

As fellow players walked through the hotel lobby, they frequently shouted congratulations to Mike, who accepted them modestly. As a professional gamer who often wins $20,000 to $40,000 in various gaming systems, he has no plans on stopping anytime soon. Good luck in this year’s World finals in Memphis, Mike!

While crowning the US Champion was the purpose of the weekend, it wasn’t the extent of everything the weekend held for visitors within the complex world of Magic. Stay tuned for more, including an interview with Richard Garfield himself and some of the more collectible aspects of the game.